Attacks on corporate and personal data in the cloud: As businesses increasingly rely on various cloud services for managing their customer data, internal project plans and financial assets, we expect to see an emergence of attacks targeting endpoints, mobile devices and credentials as means to gaining access to corporate or personal clouds.

It’s hard to predict what form future attacks will take—but we can imagine ransomware taking hostage not just your local documents, but any type of cloud-hosted data. These attacks may not require data encryption and could take the form of blackmail—threats of going public with your confidential data. Strong password and cloud data access policies are more important than ever. Your security is only as good as your weakest point, in many cases your Windows endpoint and your users’ awareness.

Undermining hardware, infrastructure and software at the core: The revelations throughout 2013 of government agency spying and backdoors (not only by governments, but also commercial organizations) showed the world that broad-scale compromise of the core infrastructure we all operate on is not only possible, but happening. We’ll need to re-evaluate technologies and trusted parties. The discoveries so far likely only scratch the surface and we can expect to see many more of these stories in 2014. Most enterprises won’t have the resources or skills to go digging for backdoors. But it would be wise to closely monitor the work of security researchers and media outlets for new revelations.

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One of the biggest risks to your online security is having unpatched programs. Keeping all your software up to date is no simple task, but Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (PSI) makes it much easier to keep your Windows PC fully patched.

Secunia scans your computer for out-of-date programs and prompts you to perform updates. The autoupdate feature doesn’t always work perfectly, but knowing which of the many programs you’ve installed are out of date is half the battle.

Best of all, Secunia PSI is free for personal use.

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One of the best sources out there for security tools, news, and good advice is Sophos, which is based out of the UK and has an office here in Vancouver. Disclaimer: I’m married to a Sophos employee, but I wouldn’t shill for just anyone who keeps the lights and Internet on at our place. Bob, who is not married to the company, is equally impressed.

What makes Sophos interesting from a communications and PR standpoint is that they’ve committed to taking the stance of a “trusted advisor.” Good will is such an unusual tactic in this hard-sell world that some are naturally suspicious of their aims, but Sophos continues to freely offer their knowledge and some of their tools to the community in order to keep us all safer. And it seems to pay off.